I was born and raised in Imrahor, a valley neighborhood in Ankara that lived inside strange conflicted feelings. This entire neighborhood was abandoned, self built small houses, green, autonomous, forgotten yet so close to the historically bureaucratic and aristocratic center of the capital. A patch of wild area where wild birds stop by when I was a child. The neglect within walking distance of power.
For decades it existed in that liminal state: half-inhabited, half-erased from official memory. Also for decades this area was considered to be the lungs of the city and had great potential. Then one day it was demolished to be replaced by tall buildings. Not gradually gentrified, but cleared entirely. The valley opened for whatever the city's next transformation demands.
Back in 2023 when the razoring of the neighborhood happening, I went back with a camera to freeze what remained: an entire neighborhood giving away its last breath, surrendering the last traces of memory still held in crumbling weak walls and scattered rubble. These photographs are not documentation of progress. They are a record of what urban transformation costs when the people who carry a place's memory are not the ones who decide its fate. A record of the power of the state razoring what people build with their own hands.
I have the new photos as well. But that is too ugly to show. Simply tall buildings, typical Turkish urbanization.
The new city already waits on the edge of the hill, creeping in to greens. Below it, the valley floor is stripped back to earth, stone, and whatever could not be carried away.
Houses that once held generations reduced to weight and volume, waiting to be removed.
Photographs taken in Imrahor, Ankara — March 29, 2023 by Hasan Tayyar Besik